Summers are great before you turn 9. At least that's what the cut-off was in my house. My dad was kind of a workaholic and couldn't stand to see any of his 4 kids just goofing off...at least after the age of 8, That's when he would put us to work in his "home office" (my dad was way ahead of his time)or in the yard, or the worst of all, assisting him with some doomed home improvement project like building a fire pit in the back yard.

But until age nine, life was amazing.

Watching TV all day, every day. Eating huge bowls of Cap'n Crunch in cold milk, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Sometimes lunch was more extravagant... like a slice of individually wrapped cheese. Mmmmm.

Wearing dirty clothes with the shades pulled against the sun until I was so saturated with cartoon images and cereal that I couldn't take it anymore and I'd wander back to my room and set up my army men all over the unmade bed. If I got bored with that, I would get distracted for the rest of the afternoon by the strange pictures in some children's book that used to belong to my grandma. I never read the book but the pictures were awesome. They were like these full-color illustrations of violent scenes involving kids my age...some of them were on fire, or hung upside down from a rope by their feet, or two kids squaring off beating the crap out of each other with blood all over their faces. My mom said that children's books were less politically correct back then.

I had two major activities when I was eight. Little League Baseball was every Tuesday and Friday night. I played for Davis Lumber. I was the smallest guy on the team but that doesn't mean I wasn't good! The fact that I wasn't good is why I wasn't good. Then Saturday mornings were Junior Bowling. I'm not gonna lie...at age eight, I was a bit of a bowling phenom. I lived a block away from the bowling alley and practically lived there. I had my first two-hundred game at 7. By age eight, my average was 174. I still hate Craig Gold for telling me that "bowling is for goobers." Maybe I wouldn't have quit and I'd be a professional today!

I miss summers as a kid, don't you?